This invention relates to methods, compositions and articles for automatically cleaning and sanitizing toilets wherein an activator composition and hypochlorite are separately dispensed into the toilet bowl during flushing.
Commercially available automatic toilet bowl cleaning products require initial manual cleaning prior to installation of those products. They then provide maintenance cleaning. The prior art automatic toilet bowl cleansers (ATBC) do not provide or speak to automatic initial cleaning.
Automatically dispensed toilet bowl cleaning and/or sanitizing products, which contain bromide to provide activated hypochlorite to bleach dyes are known.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,248,827, Kitko, issued Feb. 3, 1981, discloses certain dyes which are bleached to a colorless state in less than 10 minutes in the toilet bowl by hypochlorite which is catalyzed by bromide ion. However, this patent does not teach that the higher levels of the available chlorine (20 ppm plus) with the bromide are needed for nonmanual initial cleaning of the toilet bowls. In fact, the preferred levels (2-10 ppm of available chlorine) taught by Kitko are much too low for nonmanual initial cleaning.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,353,866, Wong, issued Oct. 12, 1982, discloses a method of bleaching of certain triarylmethane dyes in aqueous systems with low concentration of hypochlorite ion, activated by the presence of bromide ion and ammonium ions. The method is particularly useful in providing a disappearing color signal in the automatic cleaning and sanitizing of toilet bowls with low concentrations of hypochlorite.
An object of the invention is to provide a method for automatic cleaning and sanitization of toilets wherein organic soils are removed without initial manual cleaning of the toilet bowl, and to provide articles and compositions adapted for use in said method.